Tariffs Brought in Record 2025 Customs Revenue But Tanked Imports From China

Printing February 23, 2026

Tariffs Brought in Record 2025 Customs Revenue But Tanked Imports From China

2025 trade data shows how tariffs disrupted imports, shifted sourcing – including in promo – away from China and drove record customs revenue, with lasting implications for promo in 2026.

ASI Media spent the bulk of 2025 reporting on tariff ups and downs – from initial announcements to rollbacks and negotiations with China and other nations. We’ve also stayed on the pulse of what tariffs mean for the promo industry moving forward, looking at economic metrics, Supreme Court cases and reactions for promo pros in real time.

The industry’s concerns have centered around both the increased import costs themselves and, more significantly, the uncertainty around the levies. The news cycle around changing rates and fresh negotiations has largely quieted since the fourth quarter, especially following meetings with China in November, but the wider economy – and the everyday consumer – have begun to feel the effects of how tariffs have disrupted the international trade cycle.

With 2025 in the rearview, here’s a look at a few concrete measures of how tariffs impacted international trade – especially promo prices and sourcing – as we reach the one-year mark of this new round of tariffs.

Sbhd: X Times More Customs Revenue

In 2024, the U.S. government collected about $71.5 billion in customs revenue.

In 2025, customs revenue had surpassed that figure by June – and that’s despite notable shifts in the actual effective tariff rate and overall import values during that time. Through the full year, the U.S. government collected more than $265 billion in tariffs and customs duties, nearly four times 2024’s totals.

EMBED: Customs Duties Collected Since 2015 | Flourish

The jump up, understandably, began in April when President Trump’s first intensive round of “reciprocal tariffs” went into effect and earlier increases on Chinese goods started to roll in.

The most lucrative month for import tariffs was October, at $31.3 billion. For comparison, the previous peak from within the past decade was $9.6 billion in April 2022, when pandemic restrictions – and their subsequent supply chain woes – began to ease. And although monthly revenue has dipped slightly since November, figures have settled at a rate that’s still more than triple the approximate monthly averages for 2024.

The promo industry particularly felt the economic repercussions of heightened tariffs – and more often, the uncertainty that came with changing rates – during a rocky start to 2025 that saw declining sales for nearly half of promo companies, ASI Research estimated.

But as the industry rebounded to a solid close sales wise, companies had a more concrete measure of the impact of tariffs on operational costs.

Dilip Bhavnani, COO of Counselor Top 40 supplier Sunscope (asi/90075), for example, estimates that his firm paid several million in tariffs for 2025 – easily triple what they might have in 2023. At tech-focused supplier iClick (asi/62124), CEO Jeff Roberts said the company spent 44% more on tariffs in 2025 than they did in 2024, despite moving slightly less overall inventory.

Eric Turney – president of The Monterey Company (asi/275832), which manages a significant chunk of custom overseas orders – approximated that roughly 50% of an item’s cost was going toward a tariff charge, compared to maybe 15% previously.

Rates vary widely throughout the tariff code based on country of origin and product category, to account for duty-free exceptions or trade agreements product exemptions – hence the equally wide variety of charges for promo firms depending on their sourcing priorities and product focuses. But one thing was clear: costs only went up.

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Sbhd: The Impact on Promo Prices

ASI Media made in clear in our reporting of promo’s record year-end sales figure of $27.7 billion that much of the industry’s 4.3% year-over-year growth was likely due to both suppliers and distributors raising prices due to tariffs.

The most recent time ASI Research surveyed suppliers in June, two-thirds of them had already raised prices. The end-of-year quarterly sales survey found that by December, nearly 90% of distributors had raised their prices throughout the year, to an average of 11%, well over the industry’s growth rate.

PROMO PRICE INCREASES CHART: Percentage Raised Prices Q4 2025 | Flourish

At a certain point, it became inevitable, suppliers told ASI Media, as the more direct impacts of tariffs on operational costs became clear. Economists have estimated that the overall average effective tariff rate – which is calculated by factoring in different countries’ levy rates, product category exceptions and trade agreements – spiked as high as 16% in April when the highest tariffs on China were in effect.

It’s since settled at around 13%, according to a recent report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. While lower than the astronomical 145% rate on China specifically that made headlines all spring – thanks, again to some product category exceptions and trade agreements – it’s still up from an average of just 2.6% at the beginning of 2025.

Bhavnani tried to be as open as possible with clients about line item costs like shipping and tariffs over the course of the year, particularly when deciding in which country to manufacture a custom order. On a more granular level, that has meant negotiating with his factory partners overseas more frequently to win savings on cost of goods where he can. (Tariffs are paid based on the price that the importer pays for the product, rather than the final price a consumer pays for an item once it’s in the United States.)

“We’re more actively involved in day-to-day operations overseas than we’ve ever been,” Bhavnani said, “just because we have to be able to find those savings and be able to pass them along to clients.”

PULL STAT: 13%

The estimated average effective tariff rate for products imported to the U.S., as of December 2025. This is up from the 2.6% that started last year.

Source: Federal Reserve Bank of New York

This type of negotiation is common to help keep U.S. importers interested in working with certain factories, but the N.Y. Federal Reserve report also showed that, on average, U.S. consumers are the ones paying the price for tariff increases. The report estimated that foreign exporters, on average, reduced initial purchase prices by less than two percent, meaning that importers’ overall costs including tariffs weren’t absorbed by a lower purchase.

The Monterey Company, Turney said, was focused on optimizing operations through automation to reduce costs where they could – but still had to increase prices a fair amount for customers as a pass through on the tariff costs. Counselor Top 40 supplier Edwards Garment (asi/51752) had to raise prices roughly two or three times as much as they typically would in a given year, estimates CEO Jose Gomez.

“We don’t source a lot from China,” Gomez, a member of Counselor’s Power 50 list of the most influential people in promo, said. “But that’s where we ended up paying the most in tariffs.”

Sbhd: Imports from China to the U.S. dropped sharply

As the announcements continued, some suppliers – including iClick, for example – have been able to bring some prices back down. The company’s main goal, Roberts said, was to be able to return certain popular products to their “under $5” or “under $10” price points without tying up too much cash in extensive inventory.

One solution, he said, has been keeping already manufactured product at factories in China so it’s ready to ship – and have the tariff paid on it – only when needed, rather than shipping immediately upon completion. iClick is still largely dependent on China-manufactured goods, Roberts said, but they have started to dip their toes into other countries for sourcing, namely Vietnam and Europe.

That’s due to tariffs, of course, but it’s also indicative of a larger industry trend of promo companies exploring options beyond China for supply chain and sourcing management. Counselor’s annual State of the Industry report found, for example, that 30% of suppliers have strongly explored new countries for product sourcing due to uncertainty about the trade situation with China. That stat is from a survey fielded in June, and the highest percentage in the past five years – including during the supply chain crisis in 2020 and 2021.

And import data corroborates the shift. Monthly Chinese imports hit their 2025 peak in January at $41 billion, comparable to several months in 2024. However, by the end of the year, the import rate was roughly half that, at about $21 billion for December.

Significantly, rather than simply being reflective of reduced overall imports to the U.S., this drop also shows that the percentage of overall imports coming from China has decreased and stayed low. On average in 2024, around 13% of all imported goods came from China.

Factoring out first few months of 2025 before the first tariff announcement, that average dropped to about 8.5% in 2025.

EMBED: Import Drop from China | Flourish

The Monterey Company shifted some custom production from China to a factory in Bangladesh they had worked with during the pandemic, particularly in the spring and summer when China’s tariffs were at their height – though they faced issues with the factory being able to meet demand and production times.

“We definitely weren’t the only supplier that went over to them,” Turney said. “They got hit with a ton of orders and couldn’t keep up with volume.”

Bangladesh has also become a particular staple for Sunscope, which has spent the past five years diversifying a significant portion of its business away from China. Before, Bhavnani estimates, nearly all of his product came from China. Now, it’s only about 40% -- and that’s largely rush orders that are needed in a quicker turnaround time than shipments from India, where he also runs a large operation, or Bangladesh can make it to the U.S.

The back and forth on individual country rates, though, made it tough to plan and quote orders, Bhavnani said, particularly given how far out his production cycle was. Flexibility became crucial – when the Trump administration slapped India with a 50% tariff in August, Sunscope began trucking suppliers between India and Bangladesh, which had a lower tariff rate. (India’s 50% tariff brought down to 18% earlier this month, and Bhavnani immediately began shift some production back when he heard the news, he said.)

“We like to plan six months out, and my guys are being told ‘You don’t have that ability,’” Bhavnani said. “We have to be able to move.”

EMBED: Import Amount By Top Promo Import Countries | Flourish

Monthly imports from Canada have decreased this year, though not nearly as substantially, following increased tariffs on lumber imports and public standoffs between the Canadian and U.S. governments over anti-tariff advertising. On the other hand, countries like Vietnam and Thailand, which promo pros have reported also sourcing product from, have recorded notable increases in imports so far in 2025. Their “reciprocal” tariff rates are 20% and 19%, respectively – higher than they were at the start of the year, but on the low end of additional levies placed in 2025.

For Edwards Garment, the tariff challenges were the push the company needed to shift the last product that they feasibly could out of China, Gomez said. They pursued more production in places like Mexico and Central America, for one. Imports from Mexico didn’t shifted very much in value in 2025 compared to 2024 – but they were nearly double imports from China, notable considering the 2024 was the first time in two decades that Mexican imports surpassed Chinese ones.

Gomez said he’s noted significant interest in Mexican and Central American manufacturing, despite some limitations in the region for managing certain types of textiles or fabric evolution. That sourcing focus proved a benefit for Edwards Garment in 2025, as tariffs on Central American companies were among the later levies to go into effect and remained around the 10% level. And many imports from Mexico are duty-free due to the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

“It’s busy,” he said. “A lot of people are going into these factories and wanting to place production there even though the capacity is not as big – all of those countries together are probably not a tenth of what you can get out of China.”

Sbhd: The U.S. trade deficit for goods shrunk – sort of

The U.S. trade “balance” is calculated by subtracting the value of imports to the U.S. from the value of American goods exported overseas – and it’s been in the negatives since the 1970s. Since the U.S. began to recover from the 2008 recession, it’s experienced particularly notable yearly growth (that is, further into the negatives).

Though it might seem contradictory based on the trade shifts described above, that continued in 2025. Despite several months of gains toward closing the deficit – including hitting its lowest level in more than a decade in October – the U.S. still imported nearly $1.25 trillion more in goods than it exported, an increase from just over $1.2 trillion in 2024.

EMBED: Trade Deficit | Flourish

Trade experts have warned against drawing too many conclusions from the data, thanks to patterns this year largely mirroring importers’ efforts to avoid the next round of tariff implementation. For example, goods imports spiked heavily in Q1 as U.S. businesses and retailers braced for potential tariffs to go into effect following Trump’s inauguration, then dropped back down in April. They spiked again slightly in July ahead of another round of “reciprocal tariffs” scheduled for August, then fell, then rose again to conclude the year.

The overall trade deficit did drop slightly – from $904 billion to $901 billion – when including both goods and services, where the U.S. tends to run a surplus. Both the modest overall drop and the goods-specific increase, though, are a sharp contrast to the frequent rhetoric that tariffs would work to reduce the trade deficit and increase American manufacturing.

EMBED: Trade Imports & Exports | Flourish

Promo pros told ASI Media throughout last year that shifting the manufacturing machine was never going to be that simple – or fast. But already existing domestic promo manufacturers did note a limited level of increased interest in 2025.

Rich Carollo, president of Illinois-based supplier Lion Circle (asi/), for example, felt a higher level of awareness around Made in USA goods throughout the year. There wasn’t necessarily an explosion in sales, but Carollo did quote a lot more than he typically does, which he attributes largely to clients that suddenly couldn’t get product they had originally planned due to tariffs or shipping issues, in a similar pattern to the initial outbreak of the pandemic.

He also leaned into direct Made in USA marketing more for Lion Circle’s advertising and promotions, he said. Whereas sometimes in the past he’s felt that the “Made in USA” descriptor can be more of a distraction or detractor – because of it’s association with higher prices – this year, he did feel it was more at the forefront of clients’ minds.

“It’s not blowing the doors off. You’re still not going to beat overseas – even with tariffs, they’re still going to be cheaper,” Carollo said. “But we definitely getting some renewed interest.”

The bigger draw, said Mitch Cahn of New Jersey-based hat and bag manufacturer Unionwear (asi/), has definitively been USA-made goods ahead of America250 celebrations in 2026, rather than increased interest due to tariffs alone. Unionwear, which primarily works with government clients, had a tougher 2025, thanks to government budget cuts in a variety of the federal agencies that Cahn services. But they’re off and running so far in 2026.

“We’re seeing our distributors come to us with big name brand clients, that we never thought would consider Made in USA products before,” Cahn said. “And it’s all because America250.”

Read the full story on Apparelist.